A new study about online dating published in the journal Science Advances based upon reviewing 200,000 online dating users found that men’s sexual desirability (to women) peaks at age 50. In contrast, women’s appeal to men starts high at 18 and falls from there. What?!

“The age gradient for women definitely surprised us — both in terms of the fact that it steadily declined from the time women were 18 to the time they were 65, and also how steep it was,” said Elizabeth Bruch, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Michigan and an author of the study.

In a 2010 study, the dating app OkCupid found that as a man gets older, he searches for relatively younger and younger women, while his upper acceptable age limit hovers just above his own age.“The male fixation on youth distorts the dating pool,” OkCupid concluded.

While there are slightly more women than men who are single in the 50-64 age group, the disparity in those 65+ is alarming: 21% of older men are single versus 49% of women in this age group. Nearly 16 million people aged 65 and older in the US lived alone in 2022, three times as many in that age group in the 1960s.

One last data point. Some of this growing singles phenomenon is due to what’s called “gray divorces.” The divorce rate for people over 50 in the United States has more than doubled in the past few years, as evidenced in this recent CNN story. One academic in the story says she prefers the term “silver splitters” because it also alludes to the silver lining of starting fresh, no matter how old you are.

I’ve admired the older single women who come to MEA as solo travelers. They’re independent, curious, and open to making new friends. Some of them have quite a sense of humor as well. One alum recently told me, “I don’t want to become a crazy cat lady nor become a lesbian nor become a cougar. I love my newfound freedom to travel and do what the heck I want to do without having to check with my couch-potato ex-husband. Less golf, more art. The world is my oyster.” 

I’d love to publish a couple of women’s guest posts sharing stories of how you date or, more importantly, live after 50. You might read this article in The Atlantic about the value of women’s invisibility after age 50.